The Sphinx (3 page)

“Can I ask you
something?” he said to Lorie.

She nodded. “As
long as it’s not too personal.”

“Well, I guess
it is kind of personal, and you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to but
it’s the sort of question that a guy always thinks about when he meets a girl
as beautiful as you.”

“You’re
flattering me again.”

“Damn it, I’m
paying you a compliment! Don’t people ever pay you compliments? Hasn’t a man
ever said that to you before?”

She shook her
head.

“Anyway,” he
said, “that was my question. I wanted to know if you had a steady boyfriend.

Anyone in tow.
I wanted to know if you were tied up with someone, some man, or whether you
were free.”

Lorie looked
away. “Does it matter?” she said.

Gene shrugged.
“Well, I don’t know. It matters to some girls. If they’re going steady with
someone, they won’t contemplate the possibility of anyone else.

There’s still
some loyalty left in the world, although you wouldn’t believe it.”

She said nothing
for a long while, and even when Gene glanced across at her, she didn’t turn or
smile.

Eventually, as
they were driving past the Watergate, she said softly, “There aren’t any men.
None at all.”‘

“None?” he
said, Surprised. “Not even an aged admirer who pesters you with dinner
invitations and buys you emerald chokers?”

She touched the
jewels around her neck. “Nobody bought this. It’s a family heirloom. And no,
there are no old admirers. Not even any young admirers.”

The way she
said that made him frown at her in disbelief.

“Are you saying
you haven’t any boyfriends at all?”

“Not only now,
Gene, but never.”

He looked ahead
at the road, and the glowing rear lights of Mathieu’s limousine. He found it
completely incredible that a girl with Lorie’s looks and figure, should never
have dated a boy.

He guessed her
age at nineteen or twenty, and most Washington groupies by that age had lain on
their backs for half, a government department, as well as a minor galaxy of
congressmen, and senators. He knew she wasn’t a groupie, but even the nicest
girl from the nicest family gets to date one boy, even if he’s only a carefully
selected Harvard frat-tie.

“You’re a
virgin?” he asked.

She lifted her
chin and looked at him, and he caught the same aloof self-possession in her
eyes that he had seen when she first walked into the Schirra’s party.

“If that’s what
you want to call it,” she said.

He was
flustered. “I didn’t mean to call it anything; it just kind of surprised me.”

“It’s so rare
these days, for an unmarried girl to be pure?”

He pulled a
face. “Well... yes, I guess it is. Some-low you don’t expect it. It’s just
that... well, you don’t...”

“I don’t look
like a virgin?”

“I didn’t say
that.”

“You didn’t
have to. You’ve been telling me how sexy you think I am from the moment you
first said hello. If you think I’m sexy, you must think I sleep with men.”

“That’s not
true at all. When I say you’re sexy, I mean that you have a direct sensual
effect on me personally. When I look at you, when I’m near you, I’m sexually
aroused. Now, that’s a compliment, not an insult, and I wish you’d take it for
what it is.”

Lorie said
nothing. He thought at first that he’d successfully offended her, but when he
glanced across at her again he saw that she was sitting there with a tiny,
amused smile on her face.

“Jesus Christ,”
he said, “you’re the strangest girl I ever met. And I’ve met some strange
ones.”

She laughed.
Then she pointed ahead to Mathieu’s car and said, “You’d better watch the road.
We’re almost there.”

They were four
or five miles out of the city center now, in a leafy and expensive suburb of
ante-bellum houses with pillared porches and white-painted shutters. Mathieu
turned off at a narrow, winding side road that led them upward through a tunnel
of overhanging trees, and soon they were driving alongside a high wall of
mature brick, overgrown with moss and creepers and topped with rows of long,
rusty spikes.

“That’s the
wall of our garden,” said Lorie. “The house is just around here.”

They turned a
sharp corner, and then Mathieu’s Irake lights glared. They stopped. They were
parked in a semi-circular driveway that led up to a pair of high-wrought-iron
gates. Beyond the gates Gene could see a freshly graveled, private road that
led away into the gloom, but the house was obviously set too far back to be
seen from the road.

Mathieu didn’t
leave his car, but sat there with his engine still turning over, watching them
in his rear-view mirror. The plume of exhaust rose from the back of his
limousine into the rainy night.

“Is this the
end of the line? Chez Semple?” Gene asked.

“That’s right,”
Lorie said, tying up the string of her cape.

“You mean I
just drop you here and that’s it?”

She looked at
him with those green, feline eyes. “What did you expect? You offered to drive
me home, and now you’ve driven me home.”

“I don’t even
get invited in for a mug of Ovaltine?”

She shook her
head. “I’m sorry. I’d like to, but mother hasn’t been too well.”

“I’m not going
to ask her to make it.”

“Make what?”

“The Ovaltine,
of course. She can stay in bed if she likes.”

Lorie reached
out and touched the back of his hand.

“Gene,” she
said, “you’re very sweet, and I like you...”

“But you’re not
going to invite me in. All right, I get the picture.”

“It’s not
that.”

He raised his
hands in mode-surrender. “I know what it is and what it isn’t,” he said.
“You’re a lovely young girl with, a close-knit family, and you’ve always done
everything with Momma’s approval, in the right, old-fashioned way. Well,
suppose I said that’s all right by me.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning I’ll
call on you tomorrow at some respectable hour, present myself to your mother,
and ask if I can take you out for lunch. I will even undertake to return you,
unraped, before dusk.”

She stared at
him for a long moment, and then slowly shook her head.

“Gene,” she
said, “it’s impossible.”

“What’s
impossible about lunch?”

She turned
away. “I like you,” she said. “That’s what’s impossible about lunch.”

“You like me,
so you won’t go out with me? What kind of logic is that?”

She opened the
door of the car. “Gene,” she said softly, “I really think it’s better if you
just forget you ever met me. Please–for your own sake. I don’t want you to get
hurt.”

Gene rubbed his
neck in exasperation. “Lorie,” he told her, “I’m really old enough to look
after myself. I may not be an expert in Israeli kung-fu, but I’ve been through
enough emotional experiences to have a certain protective coating of scar
tissue. If I backed away from every potential relationship just because I
thought I was going to get hurt–Jesus, I’d end up a virgin, just like you.”

“Gene, please.”

“It’s all very
well saying ‘please’ like that, but I don’t understand. If you find me
incredibly ugly and objectionable, I could follow your thinking, but it’s
pretty plain that you don’t. I’ve driven you home. I’ve told you I think you’re
beautiful. Don’t I even deserve an explanation?”

She didn’t
answer at first. One side of her face was lit red by the light of Mathieu’s
tail lights, and the other side was in shadow. Gene was uncomfortably reminded
of Mathieu’s constant observation by the ceaseless drone of the Cadillac’s
eight-liter engine. In some .way that he couldn’t grasp, he felt extremely
defenseless and open to danger, as if this curious situation was suddenly going
to turn nasty.

“Gene,”
whispered Lorie. 4Tm going.”

She started to
climb out of the car, but he reached out and held her wrist. For a split
second, she tugged away from him with a strength that almost had him
off-balance, but then she abruptly relaxed, as if by conscious effort, and
allowed him to pull her gently back into the passenger seat.

He reached over
and kissed her. Her lips were very soft and moist against his, but she wouldn’t
open them. He held her closer, trying to push the tip of his tongue into her mouth,
but she held her head back stiffly and wouldn’t let him. She didn’t seem to
resist as long as he was happy with a junior-high-school, lips-closed kiss, but
with a girl as sensual as Lorie, he found that the sheer frustration of it was
almost more than he could take.

His left hand
touched her shoulder. With his mouth against hers, she tried to push him ‘away,
said “mmmm-mmmmhhh,” and wriggled. For one brief tantalizing moment, his
fingers caressed her breast, heavy and taut and warm, but then he felt a sharp
bite on his tongue, and she twisted away from him, and climbed awkwardly out of
the car.

He dabbed his
mouth with his fingers. There was blood on them, and he felt the sickly taste
of it running down his throat. He took his clean white handkerchief out of his
breast pocket, and held it against his lips.

Lorie stood
there, anxious and frowning, tut he didn’t look up at her at all. Christ!
Bitten by d goddamn high-school virgin! He didn’t know who made him
angrier–Lorie for .making a midnight snack out of his tongue, or himself for
trying to kiss a broad who actually professed to have morals.

“Gene...”

He still didn’t
look up.

“Gene, I’m
sorry, you didn’t leave me any choice.”

He coughed, and
spat some blood into his handkerchief. “Just go home to your mother, will you?”
he mumbled.

“Gene, you have
to understand that it wouldn’t Work. Not in a thousand years.”

“You bet your
ass it wouldn’t work! If I want to get eaten alive, I can go back to the
Everglades and lay down in front of an alligator!”

“Please, Gene.
Don’t you see-that I like you?”

He tested the
flow of blood. It seemed to be easing up now, but she had certainly given him a
deep and vicious bite. He had nearly ended up joining Mathieu in the tongueless
brigade, and that certainly wouldn’t have helped his political ambitions very
much.

“Just get out
of here, will you?” he said. “I’m going home.”

Mathieu had
left his limousine and now stood a few yards away, watching Lorie silently and
impassively. Another shower had started, and the rain was making a soft,
prickling noise on the gravel and the grass.

Lorie finally
turned and walked away. Mathieu took her arm, and ushered her over to the
Cadillac. As he opened the rear door for her, he looked back at Gene with a
face as emotionless as a manhole cover in the road. Then he climbed into the
car himself and drove toward the wrought-iron gates.

In utter
silence, as the limousine approached, the gates swung open. Then, after it had
passed, they swung closed again, and locked. Gene saw the car’s red lights disappearing
down the gravel driveway, flickering past trees and bushes until they were out
of sight. After that, there was nothing but the high forbidding wall, the
closed gates, and the rain that sprinkled the grass.

He sat there
for a while, and then he switched his tar engine off. Still holding the
handkerchief to his tongue, he opened his door and stepped out into the rain.
Out here, it was so far away from the streetlights of the city that he could
see dim clouds passing overhead and a faint moon shining above the trees.

He walked as
quietly as he could toward the gates. He didn’t want to touch them, in case
they were electrified, but he stood as close as he could and peered through.
The driveway led down a long avenue of oak trees and disappeared about five
hundred yards away around a bend, which presumably led up to the main house. He
thought he could see the dark silhouette of a roof and chimneys, but it may
just have been the branches of the trees.

There was
something sinister and yet intriguing about the Semple house. He wanted to have
a glimpse of it, even if only to satisfy himself that it was just another
expensive diplomatic mansion with the coach lamps, the rosemary bushes, and all
the usual trimmings. He went back to his car, leaned in to open the glove box,
and took out the small set of screwdrivers that one of his girlfriends had
given him with the attached message “from your favorite screw, with love.”

One of the
screwdrivers was a bulb-tester. He took it out and walked cautiously back to
the wrought-iron gates. Then, very gingerly, he reached out with the metal tip
of the screwdriver and touched one of the iron curlicues. Nothing happened. The
gate wasn’t electrified, after all. He looked up at it. It was so high, and
spiked with such long and barbaric spears, that it probably didn’t need to be.
The thought of being impaled on one of those made his groin feel distinctly
odd.

He grasped the
gates with both hands, and then found a foothold. It wasn’t difficult to climb
up the first six feet or so, because there were plenty of scrolls and leaves to
hang on to, and even though he was breathing hard from the exertion, he was
able to get up there in only a few seconds. Higher up, it was more difficult.
There were fewer curls of iron, and at the very top there were nothing but
upright spears, with points that were rusted into vicious sharpness.

He stopped to
rest for a moment about ten feet up. Looking behind him, he could see his white
car with its doors still open, and beyond that the darkness of the road that
led up to the Semple house and the distant gleam of a few neighboring lights.
In front, through the prison-like bars of the gate, he could still see nothing
more than gloomy overhanging trees, and the pale ribbon of the driveway leading
between them. The rain had eased off now, and there was a light, fresh breeze.
He wished his tongue wasn’t so damned sore, but then that was partly the reason
he was halfway up this Gothic gate.